Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game

In the basement of my family’s home, my friend Bobby Dougie Douglas and I knelt and prayed with all the intensity we could muster, grasping between us in dynamic tension each end of a twelve-inch crucifix we had removed from the wall.

We prayed before a radio instead of an altar, which broadcast the sounds of Game Seven of the 1955 World Series instead of hymns. We had sprinted to my home the instant the nuns released us from our eighth-grade class—sprinted as fast as we could, driven by our knowledge that, with three innings to go, the Brooklyn Dodgers were leading the New York Yankees by the perilous score of 2–0. All we and every other living Dodgers fan had known to that point were the pain and anguish of bitter disappointment. Three innings and that finally could change.

In that basement, seconds felt like hours as we prayed and lived through each agonizing pitch; through the pinch-hitting appearance of an injured Mickey Mantle with one man on and two out in the bottom of the seventh inning (he popped out); through the tension an inning later as the Yankees put two men on with two out (the young Dodger pitcher Johnny Podres struck out Hank Bauer on a high fastball to end the threat). Release did not come until Yankee rookie Elston Howard tapped the final pitch (a changeup) weakly to short—indeed, not until shortstop Pee Wee Reese’s low throw had been snared by the outstretched glove of Gil Hodges at first base.

For three innings, time had slowed; but in that moment it froze: The Brooklyn Dodgers had won the World Series! Seven decades of waiting were over! Dougie raised his arms in exultation, releasing the crucifix, whereupon the laws of physics drove the head of Christ into my mouth, chipping my front tooth. I wore that chipped front tooth, unrepaired, as a visible memento for nearly fifty years.

All these years later, every pitch of those last three innings is etched in memory—not because our prayers were answered (at least not in any way that I would acknowledge today). That day lives for me still because it was magical (better yet, mystical): the improbable triumph, yes; but even more important, the intensity of the hope and ecstasy that Dougie and I shared.

For the two of us, baseball and our still-forming Catholic faith were not connected literally; nonetheless, though we did not appreciate it at the time, baseball that day displayed some of the profound and complex elements that constitute religion. We were transported to a plane familiar to the faithful—to a place where faith, hope, and love were as much on display as Podres’s arm.

October 4, 1955. For me and millions of others, a sacred day. Why? Hard to put into words. Impossible to capture completely in our limited vocabulary.

But we do have a word for something that defies reduction to words: ineffable. We cannot define the ineffable, even though we can experience and know it profoundly (I know Lisa, my wife, loves me). And we can evoke it—in story or myth (not myth as falsehood, but myth in the original, sublime sense of the word).

We live in the age of science; the wonders of knowledge and the results created by it surround us. Its possibilities give us hope for a better world. In some quarters, however, the promise of science has spawned what might be called scientism—a belief that just because something is said (ipse dixit, as scholars like to say), science captures or will capture all that there is to know in any sense of that word. I do not believe this.

As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote: God is not a scientific problem, and scientific methods are not capable of solving it….[T]he problem of God is not only related to phenomena within nature but to nature itself; not only to concepts within thinking but to thinking itself. It is a problem that refers to what surpasses nature, to what lies beyond all things and all concepts. The moment we utter the name of God we leave the level of scientific thinking and enter the realm of the ineffable.

My New York University colleague Thomas Nagel, who is widely recognized as one of the most thoughtful philosophical minds of our time, argues forcefully in his most recent book, Mind and Cosmos, that our present methods of gaining knowledge likely will be supplemented by new tools. As he put it:

It is perfectly possible that the truth is beyond our reach, in virtue of our intrinsic cognitive limitations, and not merely beyond our grasp in humanity’s present stage of intellectual development. But I believe that we cannot know this, and that it makes sense to go on seeking a systematic understanding of how we and other living things fit into the world. In this process, the ability to generate and reject false hypotheses plays an essential role. I have argued patiently against the prevailing form of naturalism, a reductive materialism that purports to capture life and mind through its neo-Darwinian extension…. I find this view antecedently unbelievable—a heroic triumph of ideological theory over common sense. The empirical evidence can be interpreted to accommodate different comprehensive theories, but in this case the cost in conceptual and probabilistic contortions is prohibitive. I would be willing to bet that the present right-thinking consensus will come to seem laughable in a generation or two—though of course it may be replaced by a new consensus that is just as invalid. The human will to believe is inexhaustible.

I agree. The story of the advance of knowledge has been and will be a continuing translation of the unknown to the known; and it surely is correct that science as we know it today is but one of the tools our successors will have to continue the process.

Beyond what is unknown today, there is something that is plainly unknowable, ineffable, no matter how hard we try to figure it out. This dimension of human experience touches some of the most important features of our existence.

Stephen Jay Gould, scientist and baseball fan, once referred to science and religion as nonoverlapping magisteria. I think he had it just right; and unlike the priests or disciples of scientism, I comfortably embrace both the wonders of the first magisterium (science) and the ineffable wonders of the second (the religious or spiritual).

Today, as for thousands of years, it is possible to find meaning beyond words everywhere—and in this domain beyond words, the religious or spiritual resides. In an age of gigabytes and picoseconds, we tend to live too quickly and to miss much that we might see. Baseball, as it turns out, can help us develop the capacity to see through to another, sacred space. Indeed, the more we come to appreciate the sport’s intricacies and evocative power, the clearer it is that it shares much with what we traditionally have called religion.

Exploring the elements of a religious and spiritual life is a thread running through courses that I have taught over nearly five decades. I was put on this earth to be in a classroom; I am one of the few university presidents who teaches a full faculty schedule. This book grew out of one of my courses, one called Baseball as a Road to God. Like any good creation story, it begins in a garden.

It was November 21, 1999, and I was standing in the garden of Villa La Pietra, NYU’s fifty-seven-acre campus in Florence, Italy. I was then dean of the School of Law, and we had just finished three days hosting seven heads of government, led by the President of the United States.

We had received the wheels-up signal, meaning all the leaders were aloft in their jets and no longer our responsibility, and we had begun a party for those who had worked on the event. Just then, an impious student (one of the volunteer workers) approached me: I understand you’re a big baseball fan, he said. I think the sport is silly and I don’t understand why anybody would waste time on it.

You are among the great unwashed, I replied, invoking a favorite line of the mystical Charlie Winans, my mentor during high school and long afterward.

Charlie is central to this story, literally and spiritually. Father William O’Malley, one of his colleagues at the remarkable Jesuit high school I attended, caught the essence of Charlie when he wrote: "Charlie had the body of Orson Welles, the voice of James Earl Jones, and the soul of Francis of Assisi. Charlie could drink till three but be up for mass at six. He was the first fully real-ized Christian I ever met."

In and out of class, Charlie urged us, a group of Brooklyn Catholic working-class boys, to play another octave on the piano (taste the food you have not tasted, sing the song you have not sung, visit the place you have never visited). He pressed us to find wonder in places and things that seemed unremarkable on the surface but that could be transformed by careful inspection and introspection.

Channeling Charlie and relishing the student’s challenge, I made him a proposal: If you will read twelve books that I choose next semester, I will direct you in an independent study at the end of which you will realize that baseball is a road to God. He did, and I did, and it didn’t take long before word of our work together spread. Other students asked to take the course, and it became a seminar that I have taught for ten years.

My work with my students and the course that has evolved from it has never been about proselytizing them for religion or for God (whatever that word means to you). At first, it was about forcing them to develop their understanding of what the words religion and God could mean, so that they could make considered decisions about whether they wished to pursue either; baseball was the vehicle for developing that understanding, as we would probe each week whether, for the characters we encountered in the readings, it operated as a religion or caused them to encounter God (in any sense of the word). I was and remain indifferent to whether a student came to view baseball as a road to God (the indefinite article clearly signals it is not the road for everyone). Over the years, however, I became very interested in helping the students to develop their capacity for contemplation, sensitivity, awareness, and mystical intensity. Baseball, it turns out, is a wonderful laboratory.

Not long ago, the PBS journalist Bill Moyers featured the seminar as part of an interview he did with me. He taped during two classes, in one asking a student to explain the content of the course. You know, the student replied, my friends ask me to explain it all the time. Is it about baseball? Not exactly. Is it about God? Not exactly. So what is it about? If you want to know, you’ll have to come and experience it for yourself. It’s ineffable.

There’s that word again: ineffable. That which cannot be defined or captured by words, though poetry and music and art sometimes come close. As Rabbi Heschel put it: By the ineffable we do not mean the unknown as such; things unknown today may be known a thousand years from now. By the ineffable we mean that aspect of reality, which by its very nature lies beyond our comprehension and is acknowledged by the mind to be beyond the scope of the mind. Like what Dougie and I experienced that day in 1955 when the ball landed in Hodges’s glove.

If there is the rational, the irrational, and the nonrational (or the known, the unknown, and the unknowable), the ineffable lives in the last category. And it is our purpose to explore it. We use tools employed by scholars of religion to analyze the game of baseball and how its fans experience it. What we find is that there are similarities—surprising similarities. Baseball evokes in the life of its faithful features we associate with the spiritual life: faith and doubt, conversion, blessings and curses, miracles, and so on. For some, baseball really is a road to God.

The superficial similarities between baseball and religion are many and varied: a ballpark is a church and a ball game is a mass; there are three strikes to an out and three outs to an inning, another set of holy trinities; or there are nine positions on the field, nine innings in a game, and nine muses in Greek mythology. There are also more poetic connections between baseball and religion, ones evoked by the beauty of the outfield grass or the serenity of a high-arching fly ball. Still others verge on silliness. For example, the mistaken claim made by the character Annie in the movie Bull Durham that there are one hundred and eight beads on a Catholic rosary and one hundred and eight stitches in an official baseball (actually, the number of beads varies depending on the rosary, and the number of stitches in a baseball is two hundred and sixteen). The more revealing connections between baseball and the religious experience go much deeper than that.

Some of the most interesting writing on the nature of religion done in the last century is by Mircea Eliade, a professor at the University of Chicago (though not, safe to say, a fan of the nearby White Sox). Eliade chronicled the continuous human search for meaning and for vehicles capable of connecting believers to the sacred—what for them is experienced as holy. With thousands of examples drawn across time and place, he shows that the experience of the sacred is subjective. Each person in his own time, place, and context makes a choice, separating what is sacred for him from what is profane for him. Eliade’s definition of the sacred and the profane is deliberately circular: The sacred is that which is not profane; the profane is that which is not sacred.

The sacred manifests itself, he tells us, in space and time; certain places, things, and actions evoke for a religious man the spiritual plane. And connecting to this ineffable domain forms the basis of the religious experience. Eliade called this phenomenon a hierophany (the shining through of the sacred). Such experiences are not the exclusive province of organized religion; as it turns out, we humans have developed a variety of ways (from yoga to a well-turned 6-4-3 double play) to transcend the mundane experience of everyday life.

And sometimes, we are transformed and/or transported in an utterly profound way. As Eliade wrote, the mundane and profane can become holy and sacred:

It is impossible to overemphasize the paradox represented by every hierophany, even the most elementary. By manifesting the sacred, any object becomes something else, yet it continues to remain itself, for it continues to participate in its surrounding cosmic milieu. A sacred stone remains a stone; apparently (or more precisely, from the profane point of view), nothing distinguishes it from all other stones. But for those to whom a stone reveals itself as sacred, its immediate reality is transmuted into a supernatural reality. In other words, for those who have a religious experience, all nature is capable of revealing itself as cosmic sacrality. The cosmos in its entirety can become a hierophany.

He went on to say that the revealed sacred effects a break in plane and makes possible ontological passage from one mode of being to another. That’s a lot to come from a stone (or a baseball), but Eliade showed that, for us humans, it always has been such.

Rudolf Otto, whose work influenced Eliade, described the sacred as mysterium tremendum et fascinans (Latin for a mystery, both fearful and fascinating), that which is wholly other from what is experienced in ordinary life. This mysterium is an unknowable reality, incapable of being reduced to cognitive categories.

William James put it this way: How infinitely passionate a thing like religion at its highest flights can be. Like love, like wrath, like hope, ambition, jealousy, like every other instinctive eagerness and impulse, it adds to life an enchantment which is not rationally or logically deductible from anything else. He adds that the essence of the religious experience, those highest flights, is found deeply within ourselves: in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making and directly perceive how events happen.

The ineffable is experienced, not defined, revealing itself in moments of intense feeling. The setting is beside the point, be it a house of worship or a mountaintop or a ballpark. One label for the sacred (for mysterium tremendum et fascinans) is God. Used this way (the way I use it), the God involved is not the anthropomorphic deity who resides in green pastures.

Karen Armstrong, in her wonderful book The Case for God, put it well:

The catechism definition I learned at the age of eight—God is the Supreme Spirit, who alone exists of himself and is infinite in all perfections—was not only dry, abstract, and rather boring; it was also incorrect. Not only did it imply that God was a fact that it was possible to define but…I was not taught to take the next step and see that God is not a spirit; that He has no gender; and that we have no idea what we mean when we say that a being exists who is infinite in all perfections. The process that should have led to a stunned appreciation of an otherness beyond the competence of language ended prematurely.

The great theologian Paul Tillich, whom Armstrong also cites, captured the way we use the word God in my course:

The name of this infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being is God. That depth is what God means. And if that word has not much meaning for you, translate it, and speak of the depths of your life, of the source of your being, of your ultimate concern, of what you take seriously without any reservation. Perhaps, in order to do so, you must forget everything traditional that you have learned about God, perhaps even the word itself. For if you know that God means depth, you know much about him.

In this book, we ask whether baseball, like Catholicism or Islam or peyote in the desert, can be a road to God—not the road to God for all, but a road to God for some. The traditional religions also have deep appeal to adherents but little or no appeal to others.

The essence of the agony and ecstasy Dougie and I experienced during the final innings on October 4, 1955, is not in the confluence of baseball and religion on a surface level—listening to a broadcast while clutching a crucifix—but is in its depth, the feelings and sensitivities that were evoked by the experience. During Podres’s long walks to the mound, it was impossible not to wonder if he had a few more pitches in his tired left arm, to worry if too much was being asked of the twenty-three-year-old pitcher. After he threw his final pitch, after that last ground ball, we were released from all those years of misses and, as tension turned to joy, we celebrated with exultation worthy of the dervishes. In only three innings of baseball, all that: wonder, awe, hope, passion, heroism, and community.

And there are as many other examples as there are baseball storytellers. My journey along this road, from childhood to the cusp of old age, provides a less exhaustive list of hierophanies than Eliade marshaled in his comprehensive surveys of the world’s religions; still, the entries are legion. For one more, let me jump forward nearly fifty years from that October day I knelt with Dougie praying for the Dodgers.

Strictly as baseball, it was one for the ages—the Yankees ahead three games to none in the 2004 American League Championship Series and ahead in the fourth game, 4–3, in the bottom of the ninth inning. As the Red Sox came to bat, Boston’s Fenway Park was a funeral home. Seated behind the visitors’ dugout in an enclave carved out for Yankee staff and a small group of fortunate fans, I could sense the brooding presence of the famous Curse of the Bambino. Three more outs and the Red Sox could count eighty-six years without a championship.

Suddenly, there was movement nearby. Several of the VIP Yankee fans around me were starting to leave, trying to beat the large crowd out of the ancient ballpark. Granted, an early exit seemed reasonable: The spirit of the Sox had been broken (the score the night before had been 19–8), the Yankees were ahead again, and the Red Sox were facing Mariano Rivera, the magnificent relief pitcher who had already retired the heart of their batting order an inning earlier while barely breaking a sweat. Still, it was troubling to see these VIPs so sure of their team’s victory that they couldn’t be bothered to stay and see it happen. It reeked of hubris, the sin of pride. Pride, one of the seven deadly sins. Pride, in the words of Proverbs, the haughty spirit that precedes a fall. More than one pair of eyes glared at them, including two pairs belonging to the polar opposites of Yankee celebrity, former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani and filmmaker Spike Lee. I warned a friend and minority Yankee owner who got up to join those leaving: If you go, you will reverse the Curse.

The bottom of the ninth began with a walk to Red Sox infielder Kevin Millar. I knew, along with everyone in the ballpark, that the pinch runner sent in to replace Millar at first base—speedy veteran Dave Roberts—would try to steal second. It was so obvious, we later learned, that Red Sox manager Terry Francona didn’t even bother to give Roberts the steal sign; he simply winked at him as he left the dugout to enter the game.

Yankees manager Joe Torre also knew a steal attempt was coming, and he should have ordered a pitchout. But he didn’t, and Roberts made it safely to second, where he was in a position to score the tying run on the single that followed. And that set the stage for Red Sox slugger David Ortiz’s home run that won the game in the bottom of the twelfth inning.

Virtually the same thing happened the next night in Game Five to tie the score in the bottom of the eighth inning. The Red Sox won (this time with an Ortiz single) in the fourteenth inning, ending what was then the longest postseason game ever played, nearly six hours.

What followed, with the series back in New York, was just as dramatic: a pitching feat of epic courage by Red Sox veteran ace Curt Schilling in Game Six—his right ankle bleeding from last-minute surgical repairs—helped tie the series. And then the roof caved in on the suddenly hapless Yankees in a 10–3 seventh-game blowout. Schilling’s red sock was later